Caterpillar eyebrows may work for Scorsese (or maybe not), but they don't work for you. Here, tips on how to trim, tweeze, and tame your brows.

A couple of years ago, my son went to get his haircut with his mom, and he came back with his eyebrows waxed. His brother told him, quite rightly, that he looked like Pinocchio. They fought a little, and the little wooden boy won. When it was over, I asked him why he had done it. It was a whim, he claimed, but he stole a look just then at my eyebrows, thick as caterpillars, and I knew that I had to learn to trim them. My hair guy, the inestimably sensible Kemp Logan, says all it takes is three steps. To determine the right length for existing hairs, press your index finger along the orbital bone above your eye. Trim anything you can see over the top of that. Next, lay a comb like a straight edge along the side of your nose so that it draws an invisible line through your forehead. Do it on both sides of your nose, and everything between those two lines should be removed. Use the same straight edge to draw a line from the corner of your nostril to the outside corner of your eye. Everything outside the line goes. Finally, use tweezers for rogue hairs, but tweeze too often, Kemp tells me, and you can create a kind of male-pattern baldness in your eyebrows. Then, just like a little wooden boy, you'll need someone to paint them on.